I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11. Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
An Ellsbergian task for poets
Kaia Sand
Maybe the poets could come up with a better term than ‘whistle-blower?’ That’s what I recall Daniel Ellsberg asking.
It was the spring of 2005 in Walla Walla, Washington, when I had the luxury of a day’s conversations with Daniel Ellsberg, famed for releasing the Pentagon Papers in an effort to end the Vietnam War by revealing how high-level officials were misleading the public. Ellsberg was visiting Jules’s class and giving a lecture at Whitman College, where Jules was employed, and because Jules was employed, he was busy, and I was not so busy, and, thus… I discussed poetry with Ellsberg over green tea. He was an early publisher of Frank O’Hara’s at the Harvard Advocate, he recited lines of poetry from memory, and he urged me to read Robinson Jeffers.